Reuters reported yesterday that McDonald's is fucking shaking up its Dollar Menu by removing small drinks and French fries from its list of offerings and tossing up cookies and ice cream in their place.

China: the "Far East," where four thousand years of cultural evolution has culminated in a battle to see whether The Mighty P'zone™ or the Big N' Tasty™ will become the national meal of choice. McDonald's has an outside-the-box new advertising strategy to woo the wary Chinese: telling them that McDonald's food is not a monstrous blight upon the concept of dining.

Huh, hmm, strange, inexplicable: although lots of people purchase food at McDonald's, it turns out that they don't think the food at McDonald's is very good. Buh, wha, guh, WTF? Explain, Ad Age:

Food simulacra purveyor McDonald's has announced that it will "take actions" to "phase out" the use of gestational crates—tiny little pens for pregnant pigs that don't allow the pregnant pigs to turn around for four months, fucking them up in all sorts of ways—among the company's pork suppliers. "There are alternatives that we think are better for the welfare of sows," a McDonald's executive said in a statement that was probably a real chuckle for pregnant pigs. "I'll say!" said the tortured pigs with a good-natured laugh.

Last week, Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey introduced a bill that would ban "the manufacture or sale of food or products which use aborted human fetuses." But which foods or products use aborted human fetuses? Let's investigate.

A redevelopment project in Loma Linda, California is being met with protest now that city council members have approved the addition of a McDonald's to their historically healthy community.

Ban happy nanny state San Francisco thought they could get rid of the Happy Meal by passing a law that says meals that don't pass certain nutritional standards can't be marketed to children or give away free toys. Please. There is no stopping corporate giant McDonald's.

When nighttime snacker Shanaya Edgell visited a Wisconsin McDonald's at 3 AM in search of a cheeseburger, they told her she couldn't have her cheeseburger because it was breakfast menu time, come back later for cheeseburgers, sorry!!! For Edgell, this was totally unacceptable.

Once upon a time, McDonald's sold a nasty porkish meat sandwich called the McRib, featuring all of the entrails that fell on the floor of the slaughterhouse pressure-formed into a pleasing "rib" shape. The McRib's variegated bouquet of grease flavor and resemblance to a bloody giant slug corpse naturally made it a "cult favorite," meaning "staple of the American diet." Now it is back. You greasy, greasy bastards.

Denise Darbeau, the woman seen being beaten by a McDonald's employee in the West Village, may have permanent brain damage, according to her mother. She's still hospitalized and suffers from memory loss. Doctors say her prognosis is still unclear.

In your mandatory Monday media column: Michael Wolff is out for good, Tweet man stops tweeting to write about Twitter, McDonald's launches its own network, a PR man jokes for accuracy, and the NYT's paywall is a success.

To the illustrious and soul-deadening genre of McDonalds Beatings Caught on Tape, we can add this: the one where two irate customers jump the counter so the McDonald's cashier runs in the back and fetches and metal rod and beats the hell out both of them, but the cashier was a man who just spent a decade in prison for manslaughter and the customers were both women so there really aren't any folk heroes here, folks.

A citizen of Sacramento noticed a 5-month-old girl locked inside a parked car, and waited 15 minutes before calling 911. Police arrived and rescued the child, who was "sweating profusely and seemed to be distressed."

Here's a little forensics test for the Encyclopedia Browns among you. A woman is dead. The killer is a McDonald's soda fountain. That's all we know — so how did it happen? (No cheating. And no helping the others if you already know!)

Remember coning? It's the dopey web video stunt made popular this summer in which people at the McDonald's drive-thru grab their ice cream cone by the ice cream instead of the cone, making a mess and confusing everyone, and then they drive away laughing. Hilarious! Well, no more, says one New Jersey McDonald's manager.

Here is a list of the places Facebook users "check-in" the most, via Mashable:

Did you know you can get arrested for popping your zits in public? Well, maybe not you, because you don't have warrants out for your arrest. (Do you?) But if you are Owen Lemire Kato of Cape Coral, Florida, and have an OxyContin syringe in your pocket and outstanding drug-related arrests, and spend ten minutes popping the zits on your back outside a local McDonald's, and it ruins everyone's appetites, and some crazy person actually calls the cops to report you for grossing them out?

A Florida man is under arrest after attempting to run away from police who were responding to complaints that he'd been disgusting McDonald's patrons by popping zits on his back.

Well, this upends everything I thought I knew about Scandinavians and children of privilege: Gustaf Reinfeldt, 18-year-old son of the Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, recently got a job flipping burgers at a McDonald's in Stockholm.

While Happy Meals are getting ever-so-slightly healthier with the token addition of apple slices and milk, over in France, McDonald's restaurants are operating on another culinary plane entirely.